The Question of the Personal: "Woman" in the Academy

by Carol L. Winkelmann

Recently, as I drove across town to the conservative
midwestern university where I teach, I listened to a local rock station.
This was a rare event. I usually listen to carefully selected compact discs:
ones reflecting my own tastes, preferences, and understandings of music.
The rock station reminded me that my taste in music -- like my feminist
vision -- even in this day and age, is somewhat uncommon. I was disabused
once again of the notion that the world dutifully trails along after theorists,
teachers, and other do-gooders.

The moment of enlightenment began mundanely enough.
A pair of Cincinnati rock station disc jockeys spun off a series of anti-gay
jokes. The topic: WGAY, a new lesbian radio station in Denver. After a
series of sarcastic jokes constructed from stereotypes of the physical
appearances of lesbians, the two men called the Denver station and spoke
to a WGAY disc jockey. On the surface, the conversation was amicable. As
soon as the phone hit the cradle, however, the two homophobes burst out
laughing. Then they turned their attention to asthmatics. No surprises
in the city of the Robert Maplethorpe conflict.

I feel stifled, of course. In a matter of minutes,
the dirty duo managed to strangle my delicate sensibilities. Then I arrive
at school. On campus, my Otherness is simply "biological." I am woman.
At a small, private, conservative university, this is enough.

I am going to describe what I have learned and
painfully re-learned about what it means to be a woman at the university.
No theoretical surprises here. Simply talk about what it means to experience
the academy as a woman in a world where "backlash" means nothing because
the new world order never arrived. I want to talk about what it means to
be a woman in this setting. One woman. I am also teacher, researcher, and
linguist. But, in the space of this text, I will construct myself as woman;
later, I assume, I'll be deconstructed in your discussions.

In this construction/deconstruction business,
however, women have had much too much assistance in the past. The WGAY
disc jockey was only one example. My concern here is women in the academy.
Women in academia -- like women in general -- have been categorized, named,
labeled. (Then shrunk, shelved, deleted, or disappeared.) But the descriptors
for women are many, and they are easily re-activated or transliterated
-- from the biological to the social, from the professional to the political.
For academia, women are or have been considered too frail, too fragile,
too shy, too dependent, too emotional, too dispersed, too preoccupied,
too bitchy, too hostile, too sexual, too coy. These personal labels can
be traced throughout the historical records: the anecdotes of the past,
you might say. And now I am here to tell you my anecdotes.

We know, of course, that the meaning of things
is not locked into historical records. The meaning of things is constructed
in human interpretive processes, in highly personal and contextualized
processes. So what it means to be a woman in the academy is not locked
into my own historical record so much as it is in how you are going to
construct me as a woman out of the context of what you believe a woman
or a woman in the academy is or should be; that is, out of your personal
experience and knowledge, out of your anecdotes: not simply and solely
out of mine. The same is true of my students in general: in part, they
will make of me what they have been predisposed to make of me.

This is not to say that it's not useful to gather
to discuss personal anecdotes. In the end, however, because the making
of meaning is the way it is, YOU WILL DECIDE -- largely -- whether it is,
in fact coy of me to begin with some anecdotes not from my own life in
the academy as a woman, but some anecdotes about the lives of some men
in the academy. These are true stories.

*

Anecdote 1

This is from a recent story in a Cincinnati
daily newspaper: it was discovered that an entomologist in Washington
DC, Harrison Gray Dyar, Jr. a well-respected Smithsonian scholar, deceased
in 1929 -- had dug (literally -- dug) a series of mysterious, inexplicable
tunnels beneath his backyard, tunnels which fan out some 200 feet out from
his house. He secretly dug these tunnels and even finished them with cement
walls. No one knows quite why he had done this, but the scholarly conjectures
fly: was he involved in top secret or forbidden research? Did he have a
secret, second family -- complete with wife and kids -- who actually lived
in the tunnels and whom he clandestinely visited? Or was he just a plain
old crazy kook? Maybe he thought he was an ant.

*

Anecdote 2

Now in the days before the computer, lexicography
was a kind of work-at-home or home scriptorium job. (This, by the way,
is one of the reasons why there were so many women involved in the compilation
of the Oxford English Dictionary, who were, not surprisingly, unacknowledged).
So no one even noticed that C. T. Onions, the very famous lexicographer
-- one of those towering, lofty, scholarly figures who edited the Oxford
English Dictionary -- was severely agoraphobic. He didn't want to leave
his house. He had "an abnormal fear of crossing or of being in open or
public place" (W9NCD). and no one even noticed this until, after years
of working at home on the dictionary under dropping, peeling, crumbling
paint, Onions had to be shoved from room to room while the house painters
came in to repaint the walls and ceilings. He was such a phobic that he
would not even leave the house for the painters.

*

Now, I'd like to suggest that what is so amusing
and awful about these anecdotes (because while we do laugh, I believe we
all recognize that there is something vaguely, but actually, awful about
these anecdotes) is that they disrupt our sense, and the public discourse,
about the scholarly life and the concept of the "academic."

(And just as an aside: I do recognize that there
is quasi-public or semi-submerged discourse about the archetypal "looney"
professor. Now the looney or absent minded professor (as we all know) is
male. And so I'd also like to suggest that these stories may well be more
awful to women than men or to anyone who is trying to gain stature or simply
to locate herself or himself in academia and who may be having nightmares
in the dark hours about discovering oneself naked in public.

Okay, so how do these anecdotes disrupt? They
disrupt because they break the pragmatic, public, or political rule of
male-driven, academic discourse that reads something like this: the personal
and the professional are not to be related publicly. For "professional"
here, we can plug in any one of many familiar descriptors -- intellectual,
objective, detached, non-affective, impersonal.... Of course, every rule
has an exception. In this case, it's a gendered exception, and I'd like
to talk about that shortly. Yet this is the basic rule: the person al and
the professional are not to be related.

But these two men -- the lexicographer and the
entomologist -- were so embarrassingly human! And their stories are disruptive,
I'd like to suggest, because they occupy a space in the gap we like to
maintain between some of our treasured dichotomies: the personal and the
professional, the public and the private, the rational and the irrational,
the emotional and the reasonable. Once the gap is filled in with some hard
existential evidence -- say, in the form of concrete-lined tunnels zigzagging
from POINT A (that is, the entomologist's public life above the ground)
to POINT B (that is, the entomologist's private life under the backyard)
-- once that gap is filled with evidence like this, these dichotomies can
be seen for what they really are: word games maintained to keep lexicographers
constructed as lexicographers (as Samuel Johnson put it -- "harmless drudges")
and entomologists constructed as entomologists and not as people who are
irrational, unreasonable, thus irresponsible (that is, irresponsible in
the sense of "not capable of public responsibility"). It is necessary to
keep the agoraphobiacs hidden away in their houses, to see only the legendary
lexicographers. The distance between the public and the private must be
maintained at all costs, it seems -- even if it means constructing hidden,
secret tunnels.

Yes, it is my experience (with respect to male
oriented academia) that the personal is constantly denied. And the personal
as political is absolutely rejected by all except those academics and scholars
-- men and women -- who understand the meaning of the phrase "the politics
of language."

So, in the end, I delight in these anecdotes about
Harrison Gray Dyar and C.T. Onions because they disrupt the word game.
They make visible what is usually invisible. These guys were painfully,
simply human. Their stories make plain the secret: the professional is
always underpinned, traversed, crossed, informed, by the personal. Professionals
are people, with personal histories and lives. Their human anecdotes, however
odd, inform their scholarship and shape their relations with colleagues
and students -- whether we admit it or not.

In the private conversations of women academics,
and in women's studies courses, and in women-oriented scholarship, the
truth about this is recognized. Women do recognize the personal in the
professional. And women do tell their personal stories: in conversation,
in research, to colleagues and students. I teach a good women's literature
course because I can offer so many personal examples for so many theoretical
issues. This is healthy, of course.

The problem is this: many of these same examples
demonstrate that the basic rule about keeping the professional and the
personal separate is consistently violated. For example, I can share with
my students this personal story: contrary to the male professors at the
universities which I have attended or visited over the years, many women
professors were known not as exemplary women scholars -- available as mentors
and models; instead, they were known by highly charged names: the Queen
Bee, the Dragon Lady, the Prima Donna, the Salon Whore. Sometimes the names
they were called by others were generic: they were hostile, bitchy, mean.
Sometimes they were given politically sexualized names: lessies, dykes,
queers. All of these names are low, personal blows. Just saying these things
out loud creates a highly charged, dangerous atmosphere in some settings
-- such as the university where I now teach.

So the dichotomies are useful, after all. They
are used in various ways for cultural-ideological/socio-political purposes.
To put it bluntly: the dichotomies are used to keep women academics separated
from male academics and ill-at-ease in the academic community, on guard,
on the alert, dis-located. I don't have to remind you which half of the
dichotomies are attributed to women. Intentionally proffered or not, conscious
or not, the dichotomies are at the service of gender-gradations and inequities
in our notions of knowledge and our view of the proper way to "be" or "do"
the academy.

The upshot? Apparently there's a different rule
as far as women academics are concerned. When the topic is a woman academic,
the rule reads: use the personal to defuse the professional.

Other evidence for the existence of this (is it
a woman-only?) rule can be found in the grievances common to women academics.
They are told in personal stories. There are common themes. They come to
me -- over and over again -- through the words of women I don't know: I
read their books, articles, stories. The themes also come drifting to me
from the past -- women who have worked at this university before me. The
keywords are:

overachievement

under-recognition

incommensurate family responsibilities

incommensurate pay

incommensurate promotion

harassment: sexual and verbal

violence: sexual and verbal

good girl

bad girl

coffee girl

no history

no models

no voice

isolation

alienation

dis-location

Of course, by now, we know this litany too well.
We've all known for some time that the separation of the personal and professional
is an illusion. Yet, my experience as a teacher, researcher, colleague,
linguist and, by the way, as mother, wife, woman in the academy, also suggests
that -- in the case of women -- the exception to the rule is too frequently
applied. It is alive and well. I expe rience it daily in the academy. Perhaps
we don't talk about that enough. Because of the way women are constructed
by others, the university is not always a supportive place, a place which
facilitates the "pursuit" of knowledge.

Right now, in my career, I'm in a front row seat
for watching how the politics of language works in regard to the construction
of Other. I want to offer an example which demonstrates the typical obliqueness
of the process-at-work: I am a new professor in my department. I watch
with real interest (as a linguist, that is) and some degree of trepidation,
as my colleagues (who are generally quite friendly) try to define me, name
me: who is this new kid on the block? One of my favorite examples of this
process: I have been repeatedly defined as "the working class" woman.

Now, I'm not even sure where this one comes from
except that -- it's true -- I was born in Detroit. In actuality, I grew
up in suburbia and graduated from a somewhat affluent suburban high school.
My father has never been anything other than a white-collared, brief case-swinging
accountant-type. In other words, I am about as boringly middle-class as
a person can get. But there's got to be a reason why I -- a woman -- speak
so darn directly about things, why I won't fit into the stereotypes, or
the social construction, of what woman in the academy is all about. She
must be working class: part of that unruly, undisciplined, unreasonable,
mob. What do (working class) women really want! I guess I'll just have
to step in line and take my whats-comings: a label, so that I can be constructed
and then deconstructed. Defused, you might say. More generously: understood.

But I need to get myself out of this tunnel I've
dug for myself! I've argued, in short, that women in the academy are constructed
as Other by others -- and the premiere strategy is to "get down" and get
personal. What makes the anecdotes of the genders different in academia
is how gender differences get constructed. Gender is socially constructed.
And the way in which it is constructed gets quite personal for women in
the academy.

The practical implications? As I've implied, all
aspects of women's experience at the university are affected. There's a
whole woman-oriented literature -- hot off the press -- demonstrating just
how poorly women have fared (still fare!) in terms of full-time appointments,
full professorial appointments, laurels for research, perks, privileges,
power, etc.... It affects more than pay and promotion. As we know, the
general climate at the university is subtly or blatantly, inhospitable
to women, especially for those involved in women studies or women-oriented
scholarship.

This taints teacher-student relationships and
collegial relationships. Who wants her or his prestige or respectability
to be threatened by a person who is marginalized herself in the community?

In an attempt to mitigate the sheer awfulness
of this situation, I've read and heard others maintain this: Well, this
inhospitable university environment sets up a "creative tension." Women
produce good scholarship not just in spite of the inhospitality, but in
sheer spite of it. This reasoning -- I believe -- is perverse. The
human spirit does indeed always rise to the challenge, but women academics
would fare much better -- I'm certain -- in fully supportive environments.

Apart from these unhappy implications, some of
the theoretical issues interest me. I'd like to suggest two such issues.

First, the stories of the lexicographer and the
entomologist make clear this message: not any of us can separate the personal
from the professional -- men or women, overtly or covertly. And we shouldn't
deceive ourselves into thinking we can. All our dealings -- with colleagues,
with students, with administrators, with texts -- are highly affective,
highly personal, highly political. Life at the academy is highly charged!
We have our attractions and our distractions. We are impelled, compelled,
not to mention -- repelled, sometimes expelled. When we sit across meeting
tables from colleagues we have headaches and heartaches. Personal family
issues crowd in on us. We have our fears and our fantasies. And all of
these are pushing and pulling on our professional lives. This is the human
condition, not the woman condition. We all have our secrets, our ecstasies,
our emergencies, our tunnels, our terrors. What condition did that lexicographer
have? Fear of life in public, in open-spaces? It happens when the personal
and professional are kept artificially separate.

This is what women in the academy know. They've
learned it the hard way.

The second theoretical issue is this. To turn
my last point inside out: given that the personal is so frequently used
against the professional woman at the academy, it seems quite ironic really
that I -- a professional academic woman -- should be asked so frequently
to tell my personal anecdotes in public. Gender and ethnicity panels are
routine academic business. Forums for formulating our personal stories
are ever-popular. Yet, there is no safe place for women. Most likely, the
WGAY disc jockey didn't realize she was being baited by the Cinti homophobes
as she told her story, as she expressed her personal feelings about the
birth of her radio station. She probably had no idea she was as immediately
and directly vulnerable as she was, in fact. Her audience was primed. Her
story had been embellished by a series of homophobic sneers.

Telling stories is always an act of vulnerability.
Even here you are being allowed to construct and deconstruct me. I tell
my stories and you are allowed to

observe. Perhaps you are simply voyeurs! Somewhat
agoraphobicly, I tried to veil myself by offering you stories of male academics
instead. But, in the end, the anecdotes are all mine. Those here who are
at the center of the academia or the academic text will only be able to
see that the folks at the margins are actually central to the text itself
when all of us, all men and women, when you yourselves cast off the agoraphobia
and come out into the open. So, I don't really mean to be coy when I ask:
anecdotes, anyone? Testimonials, stories, or confessions? Where are yours?

CAROL L. WINKELMANN
is Assistant Professor in the English Department at Xavier University
in Cincinnati, Ohio. Copyright 1994, The Women in Literature and Life
Assembly of the National Council of Teachers of English (ISSN #1065-9080).
Permission is given to copy any article provided credit is given and the
copies are not intended for resale.
Reference Citation:
Winkelman, Carol L. (1994). The question of the personal: "Woman" in the
Academy. WILLA, Volume III, 24-27.